Among human beings caught up in a hectic life, it is often the case that a thought will come across our mental screen, sometimes from a comment overheard, or a sign encountered, or even from a prolonged and heated public discussion, and the thought flits in and flits out and is gone. And then some time later, when the original thought is apparently erased from our mental storehouse, an incident will occur bringing the idea back front and centre and reminding you of your original observation.
This week, with public notice being given in the press regarding various views of a well-known song of mine – Not A Blade Of Grass – I was reminded of an incident, going back 20 years, that made me reflect, for the first but not the last time, on how the work of an artist can produce, in the same monogamous audience it was aimed at, such differing interpretations. The incident involves a Trini friend in Canada in the 1970s, who had told me this gripping World War Two story of a Trinidad schooner captain, named Johnny Edgehill who, in the course of ferrying a cargo of salt from St Maarten to Trinidad, had been sunk by German submarines off the coast of Grenada. The German U-boat captain had offered to give Johnny time to abandon ship before the torpedo assault, but the Trini bluntly refused the offer and went to his grave with his vessel. The song, Sink the Schooner, was not one of the Tradewinds’ major hits but got good airplay in, obviously, Trinidad, and in Barbados and St Vincent with those islands’ tradition of sailing ships.
I wrote the song purely as a paean to a very brave man displaying singular courage; as the German captain put it in one verse:
‘What’s the point of this futile bravery
Against the power of the German Navy?
I salute you, but war is war you know.’
Then he gave the order to fire the torpedo
And with a groan and a roll and a shudder
Johnny and the ship went under.
This was early in my Tradewinds career, learning lessons the hard way, and I was frankly taken aback by how differently the song was viewed. With their powerful sailboat traditions, the Bajans saw the song as exemplifying the hard tough life of the seaman and a couple of them even told me, “Gor blime, you should get a medal fuh dat, Dave Martin.” (They always drop the “s” from my surname.) Short and sweet, and a couple of Edgehill’s family in Toronto were pleased at the recognition. But then a European man, not a German, told me the song was “naïve” because it failed to recognize that a schooner ostensibly transporting salt could have well been moving military equipment below decks, and Germany, in a war, was being unfairly portrayed as an ogre in the sinking. “You need to be presenting the different sides in these things, young fella,” he admonished me. (I was tempted to tell him, “That would make it an opera, not a song.” but I was still the youngster from Hague, kind of timorous with adults.) A classic response came, in typical Trini fashion, from a taxi driver from San Fernando with, “It’s a nice song, but that story…listen nah, man: you give up yuh life fuh couple bag o’ salt? You’s a madman.”
The point which had come home to me with quite a jolt for my young ears, and repeated many times since, including this past week, is that art, by its very nature, is going to strike different chords in different quarters, and the more intricate or developed the art the more convoluted the responses. Furthermore, and this is my essential point, a piece of popular art – song, sculpture, painting, film, whatever – while the property of its creator, becomes appropriated by mankind in the sense of what he/she sees or feels or experiences when exposed to the work.
Although I would have used different wording, Emile Mervin was correct in his comments to the Blade of Grass back-and-forth, that my take on the ethos of the song is certainly mine, as the one who wrote it, but that he, in encountering the piece of art, is perfectly free to find his own correlations or his own insights. Mind you, some of these extrapolations, the ones from Dr Dabydeen for example, can approach the outlandish, but even in those cases the artist has to understand that when you release your work you release it for people to react, otherwise you would store it in your garage, and every genuine artist undertakes his work on that basis. When I write columns such as this one for Stabroek News, I assume some readers will enjoy the piece, but I am also very much aware that opinions may differ, as they do, and (here’s the nub) I like it that way. Indeed, I admit that I look forward to the jousting and the contrasting points of view; to my mind, that is when the column is at its best – when it is flushing out exchange, providing counterpoint, new insights – like the Trini comment about the “madman” sea captain.
In summary, this is a lesson for the aspiring artists to learn early. When your work is stirring different views it means either (a) you’ve touched a very sensitive subject or (b) persons exposed to it are seeing it in ways you never intended. To put it differently (and this as good a definition of art as I know) your work, if not approaching artistry, is already there when it is generating a motley variety of responses, even outlandish ones, from those exposed to it.
It means you have created layers, perhaps even subconsciously, several of which are invisible to some or are shouting loudly to others. So if you write a song and six different people see ten different things in it, stay with that formula. You’re on the right artistic track – embrace the tumult.
